You don’t have to be a veteran recruiter to know the recruiting landscape has drastically changed over the past 3–5 years. Gone are the days when you could place a classified ad in the newspaper and expect qualified candidates to apply. Then, along came job boards, and now they are slowly suffering the same fate. While they aren’t completely irrelevant just yet, job postings are quickly becoming one of the most ineffective tools in a recruiter’s arsenal, attracting mostly under and over qualified candidates. We’re past the days of post and pray and are now in the midst of an evolution towards data-driven, intelligent recruiting.
If job postings are no longer working, where can recruiters find the best talent?
I bet you can answer this. They are in your recruitment ATS and CRM as well as on social media, but let’s forget about social for now. Don’t worry we’ll get there. We know how important it is to have a social recruitment strategy, but it’s a blog for another day. For now, let’s focus on what we can improve immediately.
Before we do that, I have a few questions for you.
- If we all know the value of existing contacts, why do more than a third of North American staffing agencies make fewer than 25% of their total placements from candidates already in their ATS or CRM (Bullhorn, 2016)?
- If recruiters of all types, including executive search, staffing, and corporate recruiting, are spending thousands of dollars each year for these systems, how is it possible they are not using them effectively?
- And, with staffing agencies looking to maximize profits in 2017, how is it possible recruiters are looking to add to their already bloated technology stacks without unlocking the full value from their existing tools?
Who’s in Your Recruitment ATS and CRM?
The majority of your contacts in these systems likely ended up there in one of three ways:
- They applied for an open position either through your careers page or an external job board at some point in time
- You or someone else in your firm ran a search and found the contact’s profile and resume on social media, a resume database, etc.
- Or, the contact was a referral
Makes sense, right? Your contacts in these systems are in there for a reason. At one point in time, you evaluated their resume and decided they were or weren’t a good fit for the role you were trying to fill.
Stop ignoring them before they start forgetting about you.
We all know the importance of building a talent pipeline. Well guess what? If you are consistently leveraging your ATS and CRM, you already have one.
If you ruled out a candidate in the past or even placed them in a role, does that mean you shouldn’t consider them for future opportunities?
As a recruiter, you should know this better than anyone — employment is cyclical and things can change quickly. Most job seekers are always adding new skills and growing their experience while employment conditions change all the time. Employees can quickly become dissatisfied with organizational changes or will get bored in their roles and seek out new opportunities. These things can happen overnight so tap into your existing talent pipeline in your recruitment ATS & CRM.
Outdated data is pain, but there are ways to work around it.
I’m begging you. Please look past outdated resumes and LinkedIn profiles. It’s not a good enough reason to ignore all of the work you have built over the years.
The truth is the only people actively looking for a new job have updated resumes, and as we know, active candidates aren’t always the best candidates. I’m not saying you ignore them completely, but some of the best talent available today is passive candidates. Go into your database and identify them.
Let’s be honest. Even if their resume is outdated, career trajectories are pretty predictable regardless of the role. While the candidate may not have been a perfect fit two years ago, they may be for your current role. Even better for you, their contact info is sitting right there in your CRM, begging to be used. So make better use of your time, and start leveraging what you have already built. Or why bother building it in the first place?
If you’re still concerned about leveraging the outdated data in your database, consider leveraging a tool to auto enrich old data.
Did you know Loxo has this feature built into our platform? Loxo users are able to enrich existing candidate profiles with different data fields by simply clicking a button.
Congratulations! You have now unlocked the candidate gold mine that is your recruitment ATS and CRM.
Now what? It’s now your job to make sure you are building lasting relationships with these contacts over time. Remember, the candidate experience never ends and the majority of business comes down to relationships. Make sure you are in the driver’s seat and making your relationships work for you. Continue to nurture the relationships you have built over time. Check in periodically to see how it’s going in their current role. Provide them with value and offer support. Who knows? They might be your next placement.
—
I get it. It’s not always that simple to find exactly what you’re looking for in your existing tools. That’s why in one of our next posts, we’re going teach you how to master the fundamentals of Boolean search to find that needle in the haystack.